The Rise of Education in Africa

The History of African Development www.aehnetwork.org/textbook/ The rise of education in Africa Johan Fourie 1. Introduction How often do we stop to consider where the things we use every day come from? All our necessities and luxuries, from clothes and household utensils to mobile phones and computers, are the result of our advanced market economy. This introduction describes briefly how this economy came into being. For most of the thousands of years of human history we were hunter-gatherers spread out across Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas. In those days we were limited to what we could find or produce for ourselves. With the dawning of civilisation came the urge to produce something bigger. But to build a pyramid or a temple or a fort we had to combine the collective effort of hundreds or thousands of people. The only way we could make something big was to get a lot of people to do the work. In those early days, if you wished to increase productivity you simply added more people. This is what farmers in many parts of the world did for hundreds of years. In the days of the Roman Empire, the Romans seized slaves from the countries they conquered and forced them to work on their farms. In colonial America, farmers in the southern states boosted productivity on their large sugar and cotton plantations by using slaves captured from various parts of Africa. (Many black Americans in the United States today are descendants of these slaves.) But technology has changed our dependence on unskilled workers. Today we can construct large buildings by using machinery to increase our power. Imagine we want to build a present-day version of the Great Pyramid of Giza. We will employ small teams of workers, each with their own machinery. We will not need thousands of workers, the way the ancient Egyptians did. Instead we will use skilled workers, engineers who specialise in construction projects. Engineers learn their skills through many years of formal education at school and then at college or university. They also learn through their work experience. Their education gives them what economists call ‘human capital’, which is their value in the form of skill, experience, character and creativity – all the things that make them productive workers. This human capital, combined with modern machines, which economists call ‘physical capital’, makes each individual worker 1 much more productive than the unskilled labourers that were used thousands of years ago. The lesson is clear: To grow richer, we need to increase education and skills. The pyramids of Giza, in Egypt, required thousands of workers and took several decades to construct. 2. Specialization and positive externalities Today, instead of using more workers to do things, we use educated workers. This is what creates the wealth of a society. Educated people use their knowledge and skills, gained through formal education or learning-by-doing, to specialise. Specialisation means being able to do one thing very well. Today’s engineers who are responsible for large construction projects do not have to know how to grow their own food or make their own clothes. Unlike non-specialist workers of the past, they are paid well for their services. And with the money they earn they can afford the luxuries of our modern society: a wide variety of food, ready-made and attractive clothing, a mobile phone, a computer and a comfortable house with plenty of space for their family. The advantages that specialisation brings are described in detail by the great economist Adam Smith in 1776 in his book The Wealth of Nations, the first modern work on economics. The more 2 we specialise, the more extra goods we can produce. When we produce a surplus of goods – in other words, more than we need for ourselves – we can sell them on the market and increase our income. If education is the key to deeper specialisation, then education is also the key to greater prosperity. But education does not create specialists just so they can live a good life. It creates specialists so they can improve our world. An educated person can improve our existing physical capital. Take our pyramid example. Our engineers who plan to build the new pyramid need to cut large sandstone blocks. It would cost a lot to employ thousands of workers to cut them by hand. And the job would take too long. So our engineer, with the help of other specialists, designs a new machine to do the cutting automatically. By creating new technologies, educated people boost productivity and increase the wealth of their society. An important point to understand here is that when we educate people, we do not just create specialists and improve productivity and wealth – we build a better society. An educated society is more likely to have a democratic voting system. It is more likely to have citizens who can make informed decisions about who should govern. It is more likely to respect the rule of law. It is more likely to have media freedom. Educated citizens can force governments to be responsive to their needs. They can make sure that the wealth that comes from economic growth benefits them and does not just end up in the pockets of government officials. So the best way to create long-lasting prosperity for all the citizens of a country is to give them education. But in many African countries one half of the population, the women, get less education than the other half. It is more difficult for women to get an education than it is for the men. In these countries girls are often forced to stay and help at home. Sometimes cultural or religious beliefs about women prevent them from going to school. Physical difficulties may also keep them at home, such a long distance to walk to the school or a lack of toilets for girls at the school. When women do not get an education, this is bad for the whole society. We can see why, when we look at some studies. These studies show that improving girls’ education brings big improvements in their health and their future income. One study calculated that one extra year of education for a girl increases her lifetime income by 15%. Educated women usually marry later. They have fewer children, but their children are healthier than the children of uneducated mothers. The children of educated mothers get a better education. They have more freedom to choose a job. They have a better chance of equality with men in the job market. They have a better chance of building a professional career. Economists call these additional benefits that education provides ‘positive externalities’. A good government works to provide the people with these benefits. One important way a government 3 can promote positive externalities is to make education available to the people and show them why it is important, so they will want it. In summary, education for all is the key to enjoying the rewards of an advanced market economy. Education for all is also the key to building a safe, free and equal society. 3. Education in Africa today Many African countries have very low levels of education. Literacy – the ability to read – is often used as a measure of basic education. Some African countries score very badly on this measure. Only 31% of people can read in Mali, only 42% in Sierra Leone and only 56% in Côte d’Ivoire. In contrast, some other African countries have more literate populations. In Namibia 89% can read, in Zimbabwe 92% and in Equatorial Guinea 94%. The average for sub-Saharan Africa is 62%. This is much lower than the average for the world, which is 84%. Figure 1 shows Africa’s low literacy rates compared to other regions in the world. Figure 1: Global literacy rates by country Source: United Nations Human Development Report 2011 There are big literacy differences between African countries. But there are also big differences within African countries. Literacy is not shared equally in these countries. The biggest differences are often across gender. To see how women’s access to education in many African countries is restricted compared to men’s, we can look at the World Development Indicators. These are figures collected by the World Bank every year to show different countries’ levels of 4 development. For 2011 they show, for example, that 78% of Nigerian men are literate, but only 66% of Nigerian women. In Zambia the gap is even bigger, with 82% of the men being literate but only 67% of the women. Of course, as an educated reader of this book you know that education is not only about literacy. Education, especially tertiary education, provides people with a variety of specialised skills to keep our market economy going and to develop it further. Learning to read at school is only the first step. To build our imaginary present-day pyramid, our engineer needs to study mathematics and physics for several years at a good university. So another way to assess Africa’s education level is to compare our universities with universities elsewhere in the world. What we see here is not a happy picture. The Times Higher Education newspaper’s World University Rankings for 2012 show that only four of the top 400 universities in the world are African universities. These four are all in South Africa. We have to face two sad facts. African countries have low levels of literacy compared with the rest of the world. A recent study suggests that even these low literacy rates are inflated.

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